Monday, October 25, 2010

WikiLeaks release leads to calls for an inquiry

The files, passed to WikiLeaks and reported in today's Observer, reveal how allied forces turned a blind eye to torture and murder of prisoners held by the Iraqi army. Reports of appalling treatment of detainees were verified by the US army and deemed unworthy of further investigation. Responsibility for disciplinary action was passed to the Iraqi units that had perpetrated the abuse. In a handful of cases, allied soldiers are directly implicated in abuse.The leaked files expose a cavalier attitude towards international law with regard to the treatment of enemy soldiers and disgraceful tolerance of civilian casualties.

The above is from the Observer editorial "The final reasons for going to war are being swept away." Late Friday, WikiLeaks released 391,832 US military documents on the Iraq War. The Times of London notes, "Files seen by The Sunday Times also provide first-hand accounts of underground bunkers operated by insurgents that contained cattle prods, whips and even a chainsaw. The mutilated bodies of victims were regularly found dumped at the roadside or on wasteland. Accounts from detention centres operated by Iraqi police and the army tell of suspects being whipped with cables, chains, wires and pistols." Stephen Glover (Daily Mail) offers:

What they show is nothing less than mayhem and ­murder. They also reveal a reluctance by American forces to hold their Iraqi allies to account. U.S. authorities systematically failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.Beatings and assaults on prisoners were repeatedly ignored. As recently as last December, American forces disregarded a video that had been passed to them which apparently showed Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner.So much for Western ­‘civilised’ values. American troops are themselves ­implicated in many ­disquieting incidents. In ­February 2007, a U.S. Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. Other Apaches strafed and killed at least 14 unarmed civilians in eastern Iraq in July 2007.

The stomach-churning, systematic torture meted out by the Iraqi police and military is our problem as much as it is America's. In many of the 142 cases in which Public Interest Lawyers acts, UK forces are alleged to have handed over detainees to the Iraqi authorities. This was despite the clear indications that many Iraqi police stations were effectively torture chambers that the national authorities were free to run with impunity. Their cover was provided by Fragmented Order 242, which not only allowed but required coalition forces to turn a blind eye where their own forces were not "responsible".

The problem is that they were, and are, responsible. Across the spectrum of human rights, one freedom has always been accorded a special, peremptory status. The prohibition of torture is incapable of restriction. International law and UK domestic law have long buttressed this absolute prohibition by imposing upon the state an obligation to effectively investigate torture where there are clear indications that it may have taken place. Similarly, the state is precluded from transferring individuals to another state where there exists a substantial risk of torture.

And the war logs reveal that is precisely what happened to the prohibition in Iraq, where the only status it was ever accorded was that of routine. The same can be said of the freedom from arbitrary deprivation of life, whose regular violations were ignored.

And you can read about the calls for an inquiry in the British press. Yet despite having an over staffed London office filled with overpaid writers, the New York Times can't/won't file on this development and instead runs an AP story. (The paper's At War blog notes some reactions here.)

The documents on the U.S. War in Iraq published by Wikileaks contained data on 15,000 Iraqis killed in incidents that were previously unreported in the Western media or by the Iraqi Health Ministry, and therefore not counted in compilations of reported Iraqi war deaths by Iraqbodycount.org.The Western media are dutifully adding these 15,000 deaths to their so-called "estimates" of the total numbers of Iraqis killed in the war.This is deceptive.What the unreported deaths really demonstrate is that the passive methodology of these body counts is a woefully inadequate way to try and estimate the number of deaths in a war zone.These 15,000 deaths are only the tip of an iceberg of hundreds of thousands of unreported Iraqi deaths that have already been detected by more serious and scientific epidemiological studies, but the U.S. and British governments have successfully suppressed these studies by confusing the media and the public about their methods and accuracy.

There is nothing unusual about such large numbers of deaths being unreported in a war-zone.It bears out the experience of epidemiologists working in war-zones around the world that "passive reporting" of war deaths generally only captures between 5% and 20% of the total number of actual deaths.This is partly a result of the changed nature of modern war.About 86% of the people killed in the First World War were uniformed combatants, whose identities were meticulously recorded.90% of the people killed in recent wars have been civilians, making counting and identifying them much more difficult.

I discussed the various efforts to count the dead in Iraq in my book, "Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq".

And if you use the link, Davies provides an excerpt from his book. Meanwhile the Iraqi forces who figure so prominently in the documents (due to their torture of detainees and excutions of them) are the focus of Timothy Williams and Omar al-Jawoshy (New York Times) who report that an increasing number of these forces "are becoming dependent on drugs or alcohol" with some areas of the country experiencing 50% of the forces using drugs while on duty.

Wayne County Board of Elections Leaves Green Party Candidates Off Ballot========================================================================Voters Denied Opportunity to Hear Green Program for Jobs

(Detroit) -- The Wayne County Board of Elections did not place Green Party candidates Dianne Feeley (running for County Commissioner in the 5th District) and Louis Novak (running for County Commissioner in the 6th District) on ballots already distributed to absentee voters.

The Green Party will hold a press conference, Monday, 11 am, in front of the City-County Building, to discuss further steps and to offer our Green program for jobs and economic recovery.

On August 2, per state law, the Green Party submitted the names of five candidates wholly within Wayne County for the November 2 election ballot. They were George Corsetti, US Congress 13th District; Fred Vitale, State Representative, 3rd District; Derek Grigsby, State Representative, 7th District; and County Commissioner candidates Feeley and Novak. The candidates discovered the error when they received the sample ballot in the mail last week.

It is likely a clerical error, but it is still costly for the county. According to a supervisor at the Board, ballots for both districts will be reprinted and all absentee voters will receive another, corrected ballot for re-voting. It is not clear how the office will ensure that all absentee voters have time to mark a corrected ballot. The number of absentee voters in these districts numbers in the thousands, and it is 11 days to the elections.

The error has political consequences, too. Candidates were not offered the opportunity to participate in the various public forums for their races because they were not on the ballot, reducing further the limited opportunities available to candidates who do not take corporate money.

More importantly, many voters have not been given the opportunity to hear about Green candidates, who offer a popular alternative to the major parties and the “tea party’s” bleatings for the past. Green Party candidates have a vision of economic justice -- stop the sheriff’s office foreclosures; tax the richest 1% who have benefitted from the crisis and use the money to put our people back to work.

Greens are fighting for social justice -- fighting to radically revise jail procedures to help young men find jobs and a place for themselves in the community; stop giving away our water resources and develop a county-wide response to global-warming, including energy audits, bicycle lanes and alternative forms of energy. Greens propose to use county resources to develop within our communities the truth about our county’s economic situation; to counter the lies of the corporate mainstream media; and, by doing so, to help us all work together.

For more information, please contact Green Party of Michigan co-chair Fred Vitale at 313-580-4905 or Derek Grigsby, chair of the Detroit Greens, at 313-706-2985. Or visit

GPMI was formed in 1987 to address environmentalissues in Michigan politics. Greens are organizedin all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Eachstate Green Party sets its own goals and creates itsown structure, but US Greens agree on Ten Key Values:

About Me

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